2023-10-04 00:19:48
There is still more than a month and a half left until Black Friday and Cyber Monday, but it won’t take long before we start to be bombarded with offers. And from there the pace is unbridled until Christmas and the January sales. These are key dates for retail trade, which, pressured by the growth of online sales, in addition to its own sales channels, has to try to position itself in those created by others. It is no longer enough to have an online store, you also have to be in the main marketplaces, which are in full boom.
To the platforms directly born on the Internet, such as Amazon, we must add those created by classic distribution companies such as El Corte Inglés, Fnac or La casa del libro, which in exchange for a commission give space on their websites to retailers. So there are both general and specialized ones and in all of them there is competition with distributors who work with the same brands. That is, they offer exactly the same computer, the same shoes and the same toys and with which there is no other possible differentiation than the price. The cheapest wins. Being in that fight in the simplest way is what Venped, one of the startups that will attend B-Venture, offers businesses through a technological tool that already controls more than 160 sales channels in Europe.
Follow the competition
Being competitive in price in each of the ‘marketplaces’ in which we have a presence requires continuous monitoring of each movement of the competition, a task that becomes more complicated as the catalog grows or specific dates approach. More in an inflationary environment. In addition, whoever does this job generally must also control other aspects of the business such as ‘stock’, orders, returns… A monumental mess in which it is appreciated that someone takes all the products, automatically applies our margin of benefit and worry about updating prices as other sellers change them. “It’s the only thing we need to get started, for them to tell us how much they want to earn, what margin must be applied at all times to each article,” summarizes Pablo López, co-founder of the startup with Ignacio Martín.
Price control
In fact, the idea of developing an application that allows businesses to have exhaustive, real-time control of their competitors’ prices came from Martín, who had been working on different digital platforms for 15 years. López, for his part, was one of the creators of Bluemove, a startup dedicated to hourly vehicle rental today integrated into Europcar under the name Ubeeqo. «He told me about it and I saw that, indeed, we would provide businesses with essential information to increase their sales that otherwise requires a lot of time and effort to achieve. This was in 2021 and nine months ago we launched the tool. We still have a long way to go, but we have already covered all of Spain,” he says.
The constant updating of this information allows small businesses to openly war with competitors. «The user can create an operating rule for the ‘software’ and indicate, for example, that a product must always be between a certain percentage and a limit below what is set by competition, depending on the profit margin that we indicate. . We can change the price as many times as necessary, even on the same day,” he explains.
Venped
If we do not have such an aggressive profile we can find other uses, such as campaign scheduling. It will be enough to indicate what price we want a certain product to have during a few specific days so that, when the time comes, that information will automatically change in all the channels where the item is for sale. «60% of sales occur in these types of actions, so we must take advantage of them. Our tool allows us to prepare them as far in advance as we want, but without any more effort than deciding the specific offers we want to make,” explains López.
War over price
The tool allows you to program prices so that they are always below those of the competition
The company is now working on both expanding the number of international marketplaces it tracks and integrating retailers’ own online stores into the tool. To continue with this development, Venped has opened a financing round of 750,000 euros, of which it has already covered 70%. Among its investors are, for example, DraperB1, Alfonso Villanueva (vice president of PayPal) and the Basque funds Easo Ventures and Back Fund.
The firm will present its project on the 17th and 18th at B-Venture, the startup event organized by EL CORREO, which this year celebrates its eighth edition with the sponsorship of the Department of Economic Development, Sustainability and Environment of the Basque Government, the development agency SPRI, the Provincial Council of Bizkaia and the Bilbao City Council, as well as with the collaboration of BStartup of Banco Sabadell, BBVA Spark, BBK, Laboral Kutxa, CaixaBank and the University of Deusto.
Free access to the tool
Access to Venped’s price monitoring tool is by subscription. Prices vary depending on the number of sales channels you want to monitor. If a business sells in only three ‘marketplaces’ (or less, because one is enough) they can register for free. The most expensive fee is 299 euros per month for those who have to manage their prices in more than a dozen sales channels.
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